It has also meant learning how to leave alcohol behind.
''All the wives say the same thing," Heidi Bruschi noted. ''They all say, 'Tedy is so shy. He is so soft-spoken. But he is so crazy on the field.' "
''I'm a Gemini," Tedy Bruschi said. ''I'm a split personality.
''I was crazy on the field, and I was crazy off it," he said. ''Everyone has their own speed. Mine was very high."
There was no one particular moment that led to one of the most significant decisions of his life. It was a gradual realization that he was losing control at all the wrong times.
"I got to a point where I realized whenever there was a problem in my life, whether I was getting into trouble or having trouble in my marriage, alcohol was involved," Bruschi said. "It was an accumulation of events. I was about 24 or 25 years old. Heidi and I were having one of our arguments, because I had taken it too far one more time. "I looked at it and I said, `I'm tired of this.' So I quit drinking."
At the time, Bruschi was married with a young son. Nearly six years later, he has three boys and two Super Bowl rings. His team continues its quest for a third championship today against the Indianapolis Colts with Bruschi as the undisputed leader of a shorthanded defense that will be facing its most significant challenge in three years.
The aggression has roiled inside him for as long as he can remember. Bruschi can't say for sure why. Maybe it's from growing up in a part of San Francisco where the tourists never go, a place where the streets, as Bruschi recalls, "were not so favorable." Maybe it's because his parents divorced when he was young. It certainly intensified when the family moved to Roseville, just outside of Sacramento, and began measuring themselves against nearby Oakmont. Nobody at Oakmont wore hand-me-down clothes. They drove new cars. They had more, but they were not content with that. The Oakmont kids liked to rub it in. They liked to remind the Roseville guys of what they didn't have -- of what they would never have. They liked to watch the Roseville kids burn.
